Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights with VADM C. Forrest Faison III

In this captivating episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm, delve into the world of expert insights as Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm engages in a thought-provoking and informative discussion with C. Forrest Faison III, M.D., a retired vice admiral (VADM) in the United States Navy. He served as an officer in the Medical Corps and as the 38th Surgeon General of the United States Navy, and is currently the interim Provost of Northeast Ohio Medical University.

If you have any topics or guests you'd like to see on future episodes, reach out to us on our website. 

This material was prepared by Quality Insights, a Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization under contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Views expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the official views or policy of CMS or HHS, and any reference to a specific product or entity herein does not constitute endorsement of that product or entity by CMS or HHS. Publication number 12SOW-QI-GEN-101124-GK

Transcript

Welcome to Taking Healthcare by Storm, Industry Insights, the podcast that delves into the captivating intersection of innovation, science, compassion, and care.

In each episode, Quality Insights Medical director Dr.

Jean Storm will have the privilege of engaging with leading experts across diverse fields including dieticians, pharmacists, and brave patients navigating their own healthcare journeys.

Our mission is to bring you the best healthcare insights, drawing from the expertise of professionals across West virginia, Pennsylvania, and the nation.

Subscribe now, and together, we can take healthcare by storm.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Taking Healthcare by Storm.

I am Dr.

Jean Storm, the Medical director at Quality Insights, and today, I am so excited to be talking with Dr.

C.

Forrest Faison.

He is a distinguished leader in healthcare and former Surgeon General of the Navy.

He earned his degrees from Wake Forest University and the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences.

Dr.

Faison led a global healthcare system supporting 2.6 million patients.

His recent role as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Cleveland State University saw him successfully navigate the pandemic response and not all of us did that well.

And he achieved the lowest infection rate among US urban universities which is a huge accomplishment.

He's a rich background in military and civilian healthcare.

He's been recognized for his innovative approaches to telemedicine, health informatics, and workforce development.

He has received numerous awards and I am looking forward to discussing his remarkable career and his insights on the future of healthcare.

Dr.

Faison, Forrest, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jean, thank you as well.

It's an honor and privilege for me to be here to speak with you today.

And thank you so much.

Yeah.

So let's just jump in.

Tell us how you came to do what you do or did.

Well, you know, I think my life is a textbook example.

Sometimes God plans your life differently than you do.

I grew up in a little town just outside of Cleveland.

And while I was growing up, I was taught that life is about helping people.

And my plan was to become a minister, actually.

I didn't plan to become a physician.

And I went away to college with that intent.

And in my freshman year is when the steel industry in Northeast Ohio collapsed.

And my dad lost his job along with many others.

And got another job down in the Washington, DC area.

I really couldn't afford to go to college.

And so I got a job in the pharmacology department as a lab assistant.

So cleaning test tubes, sweeping floors and things like that.

In this medical school that the military was building in Bethesda, the Uniformed Services University.

And that's how I paid for college.

But I also learned about medicine and decided that maybe medicine might be a better career choice to help people.

And decided to become a doctor and applied to the Uniformed Services University because I knew it was free and I could afford that.

And I was accepted and chose the Navy because I thought I thought you'd always be near a beach.

And I thought the uniforms looked pretty cool.

I didn't come from a Navy or military background.

And went in, became a pediatrician and then ultimately a developmental pediatrician, taking care of children with developmental disabilities.

And again, you don't really cure autism or cerebral palsy or things like that.

But you help families work through the grieving process for the normal child they were expecting and realize that the child that they have is wonderful and then you help them deal with the medical issues surrounding that.

And I just found that very attractive.

Ultimately, was privileged to go into more leadership positions.

And ultimately, was privileged to lead Navy medicine.

And so, when I started out, I didn't plan on being a doctor, didn't plan on being in the military, and the Surgeon General was somebody on the cigarette cartons.

And so, like I say, sometimes where life leads you is not necessarily where you planned.

I think that is the best piece of advice you could give anybody.

Where life leads you is not always where you would plan it, most definitely.

So, as a former Surgeon General of the Navy, you're responsible for the health care system for the Navy and Marine Corps.

Can you share some of the key challenges and achievements during your tenure in this role?

Absolutely.

You know, Jean, in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had the highest combat survival in history, and we have data going back to the Revolutionary War.

If you had a survivable injury on the battlefield, and as you know, there are some injuries that are just not survivable.

But if you had a survivable injury, you had well over a 95 percent chance of survival.

We built a system of health care from point of injury all the way back to recovery and rehabilitation in the United States that was really unprecedented.

In fact, the American College of Surgeons said that our trauma center in Kandahar, in Afghanistan, was the finest trauma center in the world.

We built a system that guaranteed high combat survival.

We came home to a nation that had put things on hold to be able to finance that.

Congress looked at cutting budgets and cutting resources for military medicine, to go and put money towards these other things that had been put on hold.

There was a great deal of interest and direction to cut resources.

One of my challenges was to really help people understand that while we had high combat survival in this war against tribes and insurgents, the next war against a potential nation state was going to be very different and very much more challenging than what we had ever seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Before we started cutting resources and making very big decisions, some of which might take years to reverse, we needed to really step back and answer for ourselves, what is success?

What are we really trying to do here?

How will we know we've achieved success?

And perhaps most importantly, what do we need to ensure that we preserve or even grow to ensure that we've got high combat survival in future fights which may be very different and much more challenging than what we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And the second thing was the challenge for me was to prepare for that fight.

And so when you look at our model of healthcare in the military, we had used the military healthcare system not only to take care of service members and their families, but also to provide the patients on which our medical staff and healthcare staff could retain and maintain their skills and competencies.

But as with advances in medicine and other things, we were not seeing sick patients.

And so the patients that we were seeing really weren't giving us the experience we needed to be prepared for that next fight.

And this led me to create trauma centers for our hospital corpsmen when they finished their initial training in the Navy to go and work at a civilian trauma center so that the first time they saw blood was not on the battlefield.

This allowed, gave me the insights to really start looking at putting some of our healthcare teams in civilian, high-volume civilian institutions to really maintain their skills and competencies.

As you might imagine, there was some drama with that.

There was some, a lot of move-in parts.

But I think my two biggest challenges were preparing for the next fight and ensuring that our decision makers really were thinking about what do we need to preserve to have high combat survival in the future, because that is the expectation of every service member and their family back home.

Absolutely.

Now, we're going to talk a little bit about the pandemic, and maybe everyone's afraid of the pandemic, not afraid, but maybe tired of talking about the pandemic.

But I think there are some lessons that we really need to make sure we learned.

You were involved in the pandemic response efforts, both at the Navy and at Cleveland State University.

How did your experience in military medicine inform your approach to managing a public health crisis like the pandemic?

Thanks, Jean.

I think I had been involved in several mass episodes while I was still on active duty.

I was privileged to help lead the relief efforts for the Haiti earthquake and the Fukushima response to assist one of our strong strategic partners in the region, Japan, to deal with that.

The things that I had learned from those experiences and brought to the pandemic response when I was at Cleveland State was a clear understanding and value of the importance of teamwork.

You know, healthcare and responding to a disaster is a team sport.

No one person does it alone.

And you really have to rely on different perspectives, different expertise coming to the table.

And in order to be able to do that successfully, as a leader, you have to create a culture of trust and value of all perspectives.

No perspective is unimportant.

And so creating that trust in that environment where people feel free and empowered to share their perspectives and concerns really is foundational to any successful mass response.

You really have to learn to prioritize your efforts.

And what is going to have the biggest impact for the most vulnerable people that you need to think about first and prioritize those.

You absolutely need to target the vulnerable.

In Northeast Ohio, for us, that was folks with chronic conditions.

Northeast Ohio is an interesting place because a fair number of folks live below the federal poverty line and have got challenges with health care.

They're vulnerable.

The elderly, those that are living in nursing homes and things like that, they need to be targeted because they are at greatest risk.

And then I learned something I've learned pretty much in every episode, the criticality of communication.

You can never over communicate.

Communicate, communicate, communicate, be transparent, build trust, be honest with people, value all the perspectives, and create a high-functioning team, I think is foundational to any successful response.

Yes, I agree.

The criticality of communication.

Yes, definitely.

On that same vein, with the pandemic, during your leadership of the support efforts for the Ohio Federal Mass Vaccination Center, it was recognized as a model for emulation by federal authorities.

Can you share some of the key strategies and initiatives that contributed to the success of the vaccination center?

And can we replicate that?

I think everybody is thinking about how do we get back, you know, getting the public to really buy in to vaccination efforts.

Can we get back there?

Can we use some of those things that we've learned?

Absolutely.

I think the first thing I want to say is this was a team effort.

You know, this was not just the team at Cleveland State University.

It was the Ohio National Guard, the governor's office, the state governmental agencies that came together, FEMA and others all came together to make this a success.

That Mass Vaccination Center was one of the largest in the country.

It was located at the Wolstein Center, which is the indoor basketball arena on Cleveland State University's campus.

The reason it was located there was because within a mile of that center, 75 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty level.

Within three miles of that center, 60 percent of those neighborhoods are considered to be socially and economically vulnerable.

We put it there to make it easy for the residents to access those services and get vaccinated.

We employed principles of industrial engineering to make it as efficient as possible.

No matter how many people showed up to get vaccinated at any given time, it was never more than 20 minutes door-to-door to make it as easy as possible for folks.

We built this, we advertised it, it was a great partnership with the city of Cleveland, and the residents didn't come.

What I learned from that was that trust is not a given in a response of this type.

There is among certain demographic groups, generational mistrust of organized medicine.

Even though we made it easy for them, even though we offered it, even though they were vulnerable at risk, and at risk, they didn't come to get vaccinated.

We learned from that, we learned the importance of community involvement.

What we ended up doing was partnering with church pastors, community leaders.

At Cleveland State, we focus on educating first-generation students from these neighborhoods, and using those students to go with us almost house-to-house, door-to-door, to meet with the residents, to educate them, to build that trust for them to get vaccinated.

And doing that allowed us over a 12-week period to vaccinate almost 260,000 people.

But I learned from that, that it was a matter of building trust, that just building it and they will come is just not necessarily true.

I think any future response has got to be focused on making it easy for people to access, making it convenient, but most importantly, building trust with community involvement, I think is just absolutely critical.

Yeah, I would definitely agree.

So shifting a little bit, your pathway to practice program aims to prepare disadvantaged minority students for medical school, which is just so very important, and it strives to increase diversity in medicine.

What inspired you to the creation of this program and what outcomes have you seen?

Thanks, Jean.

When I step back and I look at healthcare, it's just become increasingly apparent to me that our healthcare professional workforce is increasingly not reflective or representative of the population that we serve.

That's a problem because there's good studies that if your doctor doesn't look like you, you are much less likely to follow their advice, which is a real problem when you've got vulnerable populations and those with chronic disease and things like that.

You look at what does it take to really pursue a career in healthcare today?

Really, it's strong foundational educational preparation that really begins in elementary school, junior high and high school.

Many of our students that would want to be healthcare professionals come from areas that don't have good school districts, that are not giving them the skills that are going to make them competitive to get into good colleges.

Then once they're there without that strong foundational preparation, it's hard for them to complete a solid pre-medical or pre-health professions curriculum.

Then it's expensive to apply to medical school and it's even more expensive to go to medical school.

The Pathway to Practice program was focused on trying to create a program that would allow us to get around some of these things.

In Cleveland, as an example, 60 percent of the population are Black American.

Six percent of the physician workforce is Black American.

In Cleveland, despite having amazing healthcare at university hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, Metro Health, and some of our other community health systems, is below the national average on every single measure of health.

If we're going to turn that curve and really begin to improve the health of the community and really make Cleveland attractive for economic growth and investment and things like that, and increasing the quality of life, we have got to make sure that the medical workforce reflects and represents the population that it will serve.

And so that was the genesis for the Pathway to Practice program.

What was to really take students and some of these surrounding underserved schools, bring them to boot camps in the summer to give them the educational foundation they needed in the sciences, how to take a test, how to study for a test, do boot camp before they started college at Cleveland State, support them throughout their educational undergraduate experience by paying for tutors, paying and helping them prepare for application, paying for the application of medical school, and then giving them money to, in some cases, go out and buy a suit of clothes to interview and to help fund their travel to some of these interviews with a goal of getting more of them into the health profession so that increasingly the health profession would look like the population it was going to serve and in turn would be more effective in helping people take control of their health and turn the curve to improve the health of the population in Cleveland And help that be a stimulus to grow the economy and all the benefits that we wanted to see in the area.

And I'm pleased to say that the program has been incredibly successful.

We went from about 25% acceptance in the medical school until recently under the current leadership at Cleveland State, 85% of the students that are in that program gain acceptance to medical school, and they're doing great.

That's fantastic.

For someone who applied to medical school, that is an amazing acceptance rate.

So you have received numerous awards for your leadership and contributions to health care.

Is there a one particular award or recognition that holds a special significance for you?

You know, Jean, I'll tell you, even though I've been blessed to have several awards, those awards all represent a team effort.

I mean, I'm privileged to wear the award, but that award is on behalf of every team I've been privileged to serve with or to lead.

So they all have special significance for me.

But if I had to pick one, I think probably the one that has the most meaning for me is I was privileged to receive the commendation medal from the government of Japan.

And that was for a couple different efforts that I and, again, the team I was privileged to lead were able to do.

Number one is Japan is one of our strongest partners in the region, in Asia.

And our economic well-being, our economy, our way of life is dependent on peace and stability in Asia.

And so they are one of our strongest partners.

Medicine is a common language amongst all countries.

And so we work together to build strategic alliances, to build working relationships between our military medical system and the military medical system of the Japanese military.

And ultimately that led to join exercises together, where we participated together and learned from each other in mass casualty drills.

Seventy percent of the natural disasters in the world occur in Asia, and they are just as disruptive to peace and stability as a war.

And so we need to be prepared to respond to those.

We also opened the door to allowing graduates of Japanese medical schools to enroll in residencies in the United States.

So again, we're training together and working together to prepare for the future.

The second area that I was supposed to be a part of was the response to the Fukushima Natural Nuclear Disaster, where as you know, the tsunami wiped out that nuclear power plant.

And within about three hours of that occurrence, the Navy has quite a large and robust nuclear Navy capability.

And for that, we have radiation health and a variety of medical services to support our nuclear Navy.

We had all of our radiation health experts, monitoring equipment and everything on an airplane heading to Japan to assist within three hours of that disaster.

And so those are the two things that I was privileged to be a part of and to help lead a great team to respond to.

That also helped me learn an important lesson.

My counterpart in the Japanese military, the Japanese Surgeon General and I both had fathers that fought in the Pacific Campaign in World War II on opposite sides.

And the irony of they were mortal enemies, but their sons are now friends working together was not lost on me and really showed and reinforced to me the futility of war.

And so that, I think, has special significance for me.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So in our brief interactions prior to coming together to record this podcast, you sent some pointing, talking points, and I thought the quotes were just fantastic.

So we're going to talk about those a little bit.

So tell us briefly how you feel about the future of healthcare in the US.

And I'm going to pull in your quote, that the future isn't what it used to be.

So tell us your thoughts.

Absolutely.

You know, we are really on the precipice of unprecedented change.

There is a, what I would call, a perfect storm of factors coming together that are really changing the trajectory of healthcare in the United States and in many instances globally, that we need to be prepared for.

And how we respond to these tectonic changes in healthcare is really going to determine the future health, wellness, longevity and quality of life for our citizens and for those around the world.

As an example, some of the factors that are really coming together, of course, are all the things that we learned from the COVID pandemic.

We had some assumptions that that pandemic proved to be false.

Number one is that the US health care system does not have unlimited capacity.

Unlimited capacity is a myth.

We saw that when our hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID casualties.

We learned that the resilience of the medical team is not a given.

Burnout was a huge factor.

We saw the mass exodus of health professionals after the pandemic.

And we learned that we are vulnerable.

The health care system is fragile.

It's vulnerable.

And we live in a world today that is very different.

The example that I like to use is the next pandemic.

And there will be another pandemic.

And if you compare that to pandemics of the past, let's look at the bubonic plague that occurred in Europe in the Middle Ages and wiped out 60% of the population of Europe.

All pandemics start the same way.

They start somewhere in Asia.

And in the case of the Black Death, it started in the trading posts of the steps of Central Asia, enters via a port of entry and then spreads from there.

And that's exactly what happened with the Black Death in the Middle Ages.

It entered into Italy, and then it took five years to get to Great Britain.

Well, today, you can be anywhere in the world, well within the incubation period of a lethal infectious disease, thanks to the miracle of air travel.

And that's exactly what happened with COVID pandemic.

It followed the trade routes, which are today the airline routes, entered our country, and before we could get a hold of it, we were already behind the eight ball.

We did not use some of the tools that were at our disposal, like predictive analytics.

If you know how pandemics respond, you can predict where it's going to enter the country, you can predict where it's going to go next, because you know the population is at risk, you can predict the size of those populations, and then what's going to be required to care for them, and then put those resources in place before the pandemic shows up.

We did not do that, and I think that was important.

But the take home is that we have a very vulnerable system compared to the past.

The second factor is the drive to outpatient.

Advances in medical practice, the insurance industry and others have really driven us from inpatient care to more outpatient care.

And this has challenged our model of care.

You know, our model of care has really not changed for about 800 years.

You know, if you look at where hospitals got their start, they got their starts in the monasteries of Western Europe and the Middle Ages, where if you were a villager and you got sick, you went to the monastery and the brothers or the sisters would take care of you.

That's the same model we have today.

If you're sick, you go to the clinic, you go to the hospital, arguably, we've made it harder.

You go when it's convenient for us.

That's what appointments are about, if we're really honest with ourselves.

But it's the same model of care.

But as we drive to outpatient, then that's challenging the model of care.

And you look at, okay, what influences healthcare choice today?

Well, it's not quality because in our country, the insurance industry, competitive pressures, regulatory oversight have pretty much driven the bad actors out of the marketplace.

By and large, you're getting good quality where you go.

It's not priced because you're by and large not paying the bill.

So what influences healthcare choice today?

It's convenience and the experience of care.

And that's why you're seeing hospitals invest in valet parking services and gourmet meals and things like that.

You're seeing the rise of retail healthcare options because people want to integrate healthcare into their lives.

Not have it intrude on their lives.

And that's why we're seeing the rise of healthcare options at Walmart and Amazon and places like that.

Because convenience today drives the train.

And that challenges our traditional model of healthcare on which our medical education system is built, on which we train and the things like that.

That's another thing that we've got to deal with.

We've got to deal with the rising trajectory of healthcare costs.

The United States spends about 20% of the gross domestic product on healthcare, about one out of every five dollars.

But in many instances, we don't have the best outcomes.

In fact, in some instances, we have third world outcomes for that investment.

On a per capita basis, we spend much more on healthcare than others, but we do not have the best outcomes.

We have got to bend the cost curve on that.

We're looking at shortages in the medical profession.

We've seen this in nursing already.

Our country is going to experience the retirement of the baby boomer generation in the near future.

Meanwhile, we've seen the rise of competing careers that are alluring people to not go into health professions, but to go into other careers.

My son's a good example of that.

My son's in cybersecurity now.

I ask him, I say, what about medicine?

He goes, dad, why should I go through all that training and incur all that debt when I can get right out of college and make more money than you in cybersecurity?

He's right.

We've got to look at how do we attract, train and then provide a good quality of life for our medical profession.

Then the cost of medical education itself.

As I shared earlier, we are pricing out certain demographic groups that we need to be able to go into medicine.

We've got to look at the cost of healthcare.

We did studies on this when I was a Surgeon General.

If you go into a primary care specialty and you just take out the average amount of student loans, you never get out of debt your entire professional career.

We've got to deal with that.

We've got to look at how we educate professionals.

The volume of medical knowledge in the world today is doubling about every 73 days.

And yet our method of educating health professionals hasn't changed since the Renaissance.

We need to look at that.

And then we've got to look at our increasing dependence on digital technologies and the threats of cyber attack.

And all the things that go into our dependence on electronic health care and all the digital technologies that we take for granted today.

So you look at all these factors coming together at once, and you ask yourself, what does health care look like in the future?

How do we begin to tackle this?

And most importantly, what's the plan?

And that's on top of the other thing the pandemic taught us, which is that despite what we might like to think, there really are the has and the have nots in health care, because of generational distrust, a bunch of other factors, we've got to care for them if we really are committed to improving the health of the nation.

So lots of factors coming together at once, and it really requires to look at what's our plan going forward.

Yeah, you touched on cyber security and it's huge in health care right now.

And you sent me a quote, so I was going to ask you about it, the importance of the digital imperative and why electrons matter in health care.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I was sitting there thinking about, when I was an intern, some would say back in the dark ages, I could count on one hand, the number of professions or offices in the hospital or in the clinics that used computers.

Today, I'd be hard pressed to find someone that didn't in some way depend on information technology to deliver health care, whether that's virtual care, electronic health records or the like.

We are absolutely dependent on IT for health care, good quality health care.

But if you look at that and you look at, let's just take electronic health records as an example.

There are a little over 300 commercially available electronic health records on the market today, and they don't talk to each other.

So that when you go see your doctor, your health care information is fragmented.

Your primary care physician has access to about 20 percent of your medical information.

It's like reading a book where you're only allowed to read one out of every five pages and then being able to understand what's going on with the plot of that novel.

That has led to fragmented care.

That's led to increasing costs of health care as we duplicate tests because we don't have the results.

As we experience iatrogenic morbidity from med-med interactions, and ultimately suboptimal outcomes.

That's an area of vulnerability.

We're seeing the rise of virtual care options in telehealth.

70% of primary care patients don't actually need to see a doctor.

So we're seeing the rise of virtual care options, which is good because it expands health care, but not so good if you're in an area that doesn't have good internet access, or you're in a demographic group that's below the federal poverty line and you can't afford a computer.

I got to deal with that.

Then we've got vulnerabilities, cyber attack being most prominent of those.

Last year, conservatively, 44 million Americans had their medical information exposed or stolen.

Medical information is the number one thing that's bought and sold by criminals on the dark web today because you can do so much bad stuff with it.

We've got to look at why aren't we using cybersecurity protections that might be available to other very sensitive areas, like intelligence, like special forces, things like that.

Why aren't we using those technologies to protect our most important and vulnerable information?

That's the information about us.

We are dependent on IT.

We can use it for good.

There's enormous opportunity, but there's some things that we've got to work through first.

Yeah, absolutely, definitely a huge issue right now in healthcare.

So I'm going to close with a big question, but I asked this of all my guests, and I really look forward to hearing what everyone says when I ask them this question.

If you were in charge of healthcare in the United States, what is the first thing that you would do?

That's a great question.

A lot of folks try and fix healthcare by starting big.

Let's just start big.

The problem is those things never work.

I would actually start small with low-hanging fruit that has big impact and score some early wins, and then use that as foundational to make larger changes.

So the first thing I do is connect all the electronic health records.

If you can stop the fragmentation of medical information, think about the impact you could have to reduce the cost of care by eliminating unnecessary tests that have to be duplicated, reducing iatrogenic mobility from med-med interactions, and really connecting folks.

Those technologies are available.

I'm involved in an effort right now to try and provide those technologies to the foster care children in the state of Georgia.

Foster care children move around a lot, which means their health care is incredibly fragmented.

Many of those children have got special needs, and it's a big deal when the doctor doesn't have access to their information.

Let's connect those things and give everybody a complete medical record that they can take with them anywhere they go worldwide.

I would start to get into the community and start to build that trust that's so foundational to getting people to trust health care and do the things necessary to take care of themselves.

I would start to build trust in the community, get out of the hospitals, get out of the clinics, get into those communities, involve those church pastors and leaders, and do some pilots and show that those can be done.

I would shift to prevention.

Right now we have a production mentality and incentives, but we ought to take a lesson from ancient China.

If you're a physician in ancient China, you only got paid for the days that your patient was well.

When your patient got sick, then you didn't get paid.

We ought to learn from that.

We ought to have a conversation about perverse incentives and build capacity for vulnerable populations.

Rural health care is a good example of that.

We deal with this here in Ohio right now.

Last year, over 400 hospitals went out of business.

Most of them were in rural areas, and that's the lifeline for those populations.

Our economy is dependent on rural populations, farmers and the like.

We got to take care of those people.

And so, again, start small with some pilots, and then ultimately develop a career path for health professionals to address the things that I talked about earlier.

I'd start small.

You know, connect everybody's health record, start to build trust.

Those are simple things that everybody, I think, can agree on, and then start to deal with some of these thornier issues going forward.

That's how I'd approach it.

Seems common sense to me, and I just want to highlight a few things, focusing on rural areas, most definitely needed and important.

And then I love the idea of just paying a doctor when you're patient as well.

I'm not sure how well that would go over, but what an amazing idea.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot we can learn from folks that have gone before us.

Oh, I agree.

I agree.

Dr.

Faison, Forrest, thank you so much for joining us today.

I have learned so much and I know the viewers did as well.

And maybe we can get you back on, on part two.

Jean, I'd be privileged and honored.

And thank you as well for the opportunity to chat with you today about something I'm passionate about, which is the health of and caring for our fellow citizens, our patients, and those that are dependent on us every day.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for tuning in to Taking Healthcare by Storm, Industry Insights, with Quality Insights Medical director Dr.

Jean Storm.

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